A popular use of the Internet is to review news articles, weblogs, or the like (generally referred to herein as “news articles”) on web sites. Recently, more and more web sites are using syndication services such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or Resource Description Framework (RDF) services to provide syndication information. Syndication information may include information such as titles or headlines, descriptions, and the like, regarding the news articles available on the web sites. The syndication services allow appropriate reader software to connect to a web site and retrieve syndication information (for example, typically a list of headlines and descriptions) that can be presented to the user. The RSS and RDF syndication services make use of the XML specification, which provides a framework for creating meta-tags in a data element/file. More information on RSS and RDF can be found on their official home pages, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss and http://www.w3.org/RDF, respectively.
Since a user may want to review information from a number of web sites, it can be time consuming to check each of the web sites to determine if the information has been updated. Current solutions for receiving syndication information on a mobile device are typically inefficient because the mobile device or user of the mobile device is required to poll multiple web sites to check if the content has changed. If the content has changed it is then requested and downloaded by the mobile device. This polling of web sites results in unnecessary wireless traffic, which reduces mobile device performance and battery life as well as incurring a strain on the wireless network.
Further, XML documents such as the syndication formats RSS and RDF contain data that is not required by or viewed by the user. Still further, syndication formats typically do not give the user the option to customize the size of the data set sent (such as number of articles, description size). This can result in a large (by wireless standards) download requirement, which is then multiplied by the number of syndication services the user wishes to view. This also results in additional wireless traffic, which reduces mobile device performance and battery life as well as incurring a strain on the wireless network.
Upon receiving an XML document, the mobile device is then required to parse (i.e. interpret) the XML document using reader software for each syndication service and present the required information to the user in a user friendly fashion. This can be particularly difficult if the user wishes to view syndication information that originate in different formats and may require different reader software. This results in a computation burden on the mobile device, which reduces mobile device performance and battery life.
As such, there is a need for an improved system and method for processing syndication information for a mobile device and for delivering the syndication information to the mobile device.